Gay and AIDS reporting from the years when the reporting itself was a form of care. Twelve pieces from the L.A. Weekly, 1988 to 1999, scanned from the original print run.
The Gay and AIDS beat I wrote with Robin Podolsky, honored by GLAAD in 1992. The selected columns are being gathered into a book by Psychology for the People Press.
Scanned from the original print run. Tap any piece to read the full scan.
A portrait of the AIDS activist and radio host who went from Robert to Connie, from Texas to the front lines of ACT UP, and turned her rage into a kind of grace.
Read the scan →The OBoys!, the new sex clubs, Annie Sprinkle, and Michael Callen, on whether the movement had kept sex locked in its political closet, and what the return of desire meant after a decade of terror.
Read the scan →Reported from the January vigil at County-USC through the rage, the dying, and the new militancy of the group remaking gay identity in Los Angeles.
Read the scan →An early dispatch from the L.A. epidemic, when activists, doctors, and people with AIDS were turning a death sentence into a community. The piece where the beat began.
Read the scan →A night inside the Viva! arts movement and the gay Latino Los Angeles the movement kept forgetting. Roland Palencia, Mike Moreno, and the performance artist Cyclona move through what one activist called the rage-guilt tango over race and belonging.
Read the scan →A tribute to the AIDS activist who turned his own dying into a kind of teaching. Co-founder of the AIDS Hospice Foundation, gone before the city could catch up to him.
Read the scan →A dispatch from the ACT NOW gathering in Chicago, where the movement argued whether to fight for faster drugs or for a health-care system that would stop abandoning the poor.
Read the scan →Harry Hay, Mitch Walker, and Mark Thompson on Jung, the berdache, and a gay legacy older than Stonewall. A field report from the people putting a mythological spin on gay life.
Read the scan →Queer Nation arrives in Los Angeles, zapping The Arsenio Hall Show and turning a slur into a badge of honor. On panache, anarchy, and a generation that refused to be polite.
Read the scan →The country's pre-eminent writer on AIDS at the height of his powers, around Becoming a Man. On the closet as every man's metaphor, and on love as the one reliable weapon against the dying.
Read the scan →Yesterday's street activists running today's AIDS institutions, reduced, the piece argued, to managing death while the disease raged unchecked. ACT UP's decline, told from the inside.
Read the scan →The worst of the AIDS crisis may be over, the piece argued, but the community had never been more divided about its soul, caught between the grassroots and the corporate, between people power and the checkbook.
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